800-875-3214If diamonds are a girl’s best friend, prime numbers are a mathematician’s.
And Curtis Cooper at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg has just found the biggest, shiniest diamond of them all.
As part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a computer program that networks PCs worldwide to collectively hunt for a special type of prime number, Cooper discovered the largest prime number yet late last month: a beast with 17,425,170 digits.
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